There’s a reason why everyone in 4th grade math doodled cubes, barns and bubbly letters: creating the illusion of 3-dimensional objects satisfies some basic human urge. There is probably an evolutionary cause for it––some sort of adaptive benefit obtained from cool shading techniques and eye-popping shapes. For now, we’ll just call it fun.

Luckily, the feeling of sketching a sweet 3D shooting star can be recaptured. Not only recaptured, in fact, but improved upon! These days you can get 3D drawing kits that include a pad of stereoscopic graph paper (intersecting red and blue lines) and 3D glasses. It works like this: first, you sketch with a regular black pen. Then you put on the glasses. The filters in the 3D specs allow each eye to see only the opposite color on the graph paper, and as the brain melds the two images together our focal point is pushed backwards. Voila: the illusion of depth. Really, it never gets old.